Writer/performer/educator Aimee Suzara completed her M.FA. at Mills College and has been sharing poetic and multidisciplinary work since 1999. Her play, Pagbabalik (Return) in 2007 was selected for APAture, Emerging Performance Festival, the Emerging Performance Festival at CounterPULSE and granted the Zellerbach Community Arts Fund in 2006-7. Her poetry collection, the space between. was published by Finishing Line Press (2008) and nominated for the California Book Award; her writing appears in several journals and anthologies, including Check the Rhyme, An Anthology of Female Poets and Emcees (Lit Noire Press), Kartika Review, 580 Split and Walang Hiya/No Shame (Arkipelago Books 2009). Currently, in addition to her work on A History of the Body, she is collaborating on text-dance work with Amara Tabor-Smith’s Deep Waters Dance Theater. She has been a part of the collectives Kreatibo (queer Pin@y performance group), with which she co-created the Curve Lesbian Theater-Award winning “Dalagas and Tomboys: A Family Affair” in 2004, as well as Dancers Without Borders, a women’s group whose work responded to violence against women post-911. With her roots in social justice activism, Suzara co-founded the environmental justice organization Filipino/American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity (FACES) in 1999, and has worked with San Francisco Women Against Rape (SFWAR) and the Youth Media Council. A passionate advocate for arts and literacy, she currently teaches English and poetry at community colleges and leads workshops on poetry and performance for youth and adults throughout the Bay Area and beyond.

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Please consider contributing to Aimee’s play, A History of the Body, which launches November 20-21 at the Bayanihan Center in San Francisco (www.kularts.org). A History of the Body is about the “colonization and the body; through dance, poetry, and visual art, it looks at media images and stereotypes of Filipinos, as well as the modern-day phenomena of cosmetic skin whitening. The goal of the show is to bring awareness to important, yet little-known, Filipino-American histories and bring healing to the often-fragmented Filipino/a and woman of color in America.”